ABOUT SPICE
Spice is a highly adaptive, experienced architectural team founded by Karen Cook and Jean Le Lay.
For over 30 years, Karen and Jean have brought their expertise to varied uses, including:
-
Commercial offices
-
Culture
-
Master planning
-
Retail
-
Sports and Entertainment
-
Transport
Spice has worldwide experience from large to small projects in complex contexts, as architectural designers and coordinating multidisciplinary teams of local experts.
Spice Team includes architects and creative support with skills in 3D, BIM and rendering images specialists.
Spice strives to bring together values of architecture, engineering, arts and crafts.
SPICE PHILOSOPHY
Each project is unique, each client is unique, each site is unique and each delivered project is the fruit of a passionate collaboration including courage to push boundaries.
Spice’s inclusive step-by-step design process is a journey, where the client is never disassociated from the design team and where quality, reactivity and efficiency are key elements and values at each project stage.
SPICE METHODOLOGY
At Spice, the design vision evolves gradually through an iterative process of gathering and analysing facts, defining site constraints and opportunities, and exploring design options to arrive at a layering of decisions. Ideas are tested in the form of hand sketches, plans and sections, computer modelling and physical modelling.
SPICE COMMUNITY
Spice promotes a hands-on, smart and passionate working approach, based on mutual understanding, integrity and collaboration.
Each Spice member is encouraged to participate in the investigation and debate during the very first stage of concept design. This approach or spirit is promoted to educate new team members, allowing them to bloom in a collegiate environment, enabling them, in time, to work, develop and deliver each project with the expected level of quality.
PRAGMATISM
Our world is complex and fragile.
Spice places emphasis on how to deliver the project, both in terms of choice of materials that should be resourced locally to minimise ecological footprint, and in mastering optimisation of architectural components, cost, construction and delivery methods.
Each project is carefully designed with this objective in mind. “Une ingénierie ingénieuse” is inherent in our design process.
SUSTAINABILITY
Spice aims to reduce society’s global ecological footprint.
Our approach is prospective, to confront and anticipate challenges and problems destabilising Earth’s ecosystems.
Spice promotes tackling environmental and societal crises through design and technology, with economic, physical, and psychological benefits for people, for biodiversity and for the client.
One of Spice’s purposes is to constantly promote this eco-culture both locally and globally, in each of our missions, from recycling to retrofit, including delivery strategies.
ARTS AND CRAFTS
At Spice, we have developed a dual approach that leads us to be convinced that the part, the detail, is as important and deserves as much care as its whole.
We put a lot of emphasis during our studies on this approach through detailing at scale 1, models and mock-ups to validate our intuitions and discover new directions.
We believe that a detail is good or proper when the eye caresses it, the hand wants to touch it, to have a tactile and lively relationship with it.
Through our history and process, Spice has developed a network of collaborators who understand the importance of materiality, attention to detail and scale, and the way to build and deliver.
PUBLIC REALM
At Spice, each new project is conceived as a source of benefit for its immediate surroundings, the street, the people, and the local culture.
The project is never proposed as a “solitaire,” but as a part of the invisible conjunctive tissues of the city. Instead of being intrusive, the project should, in harmony with the city, boost societal, cultural, and economic growth and welfare, bringing life and pride to the community, that in return benefit the project.
Well-being, happiness, and joy are at the centre of Spice’s urban symbiotic approach.
EXPERIMENTATION, INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY
Spice’s “raison d'être” is to make the world a better place through the built environment.
Building is the aim, and during each stage of the project’s development, our attention is focused not only on how the project looks or works but above all, on how it will be built and how this construction process will have a positive impact for the people, the client, and the planet.
Spice’s ethos promotes a sensitive and thoughtfully considered approach to technology, how building materials are sourced, and transformed in a responsible way.
Through quality control, the use of models and mock-ups, Spice constantly seeks ways to innovate and optimise the construction approach.
MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL
Spice’s humanist and careful approach to architecture finds its echo in the way we deal with material and immaterial elements.
Our civic idea of sustainability and minimising the impact on natural resources leads us to prescribe local and transformed materials. In the same way, natural ventilation, fresh air supply and exposure to sun and natural light are key parameters in our aim to generate comfort, well-being, thermal and visual delight, and joy.
We aim to design buildings shaped and in constant play with the sun, the views, and the wind.
NEWS
Stay up to date with
the latest SPICE projects
and news!